The man makes selective connections

You become the average of the men you keep closest, so a wise man chooses them on purpose. He is friendly to many and close to few. The gate to his inner circle is guarded, because the wrong men inside it cost him everything, slowly.

The danger is not the obvious bad influence. It is the comfortable one — the cynical friend whose standards are a little lower, whose excuses are a little easier, whose company costs nothing in the moment and a great deal over a year. You cannot sit by a fire and stay free of smoke. A good man drifts into a cynical crowd and, twelve months later, his standards have quietly eroded and he never noticed the day it happened. We rise or sink to the level of the table we choose to sit at. So he chooses the table with care.